Circle of Hope, a church consisting of several congregations in the Philadelphia area, grew out of the Jesus movement of the late 1960s, powered by ecstatic born-again left-wing hippies. These were the souls who made the musicals Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell into transcendental hits in the 1970s. Among them were Gwen Mockler and Rodney White, two lay preachers who had met in Southern California in the mid-Seventies, “falling in love with each other and with Jesus.” When they married, she was twenty-two. He was twenty-one.
An antiwar activist in sun-bleached hair and cutoff jeans, Gwen was apparently as inspirational a preacher as her long-haired, wooden-cross-wearing husband. She quickly found herself sidelined, however, teaching at a public school in order to put Rod through Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. At the Baptist church in Riverside where Rod was serving as a youth pastor, she wasn’t allowed to preach. Outraged by the church’s insistence on the submissive role of women, she nonetheless helped Rod appeal to the youth group by cooking communal dinners they called “Love Feasts,” which were meant to be reminiscent of the meals Jesus shared with his disciples.
By 1979 the couple were seeking to break free of the Baptists to head up their own “Jesus commune” from a ranch house they bought in Riverside. Rod, now twenty-five, became its “visionary leader.” They started a family. Gwen gave birth to four sons within as many years: Jacob, Luke, and fraternal twins Joel and Ben. Rod and Gwen shared money and meals with their flock, which voted on any course of action involving expenditures.
Rod, however, was not satisfied to go it alone: he yearned to be part of a “larger collective.” In a decision that would have serious repercussions in years to come, he yoked his nascent commune to the Brethren in Christ (BIC), a denomination founded in Pennsylvania in the 1700s that numbered around 20,000 in the US. The Brethren were themselves part of the larger Anabaptist movement, which hails from the Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century. From their earliest days Anabaptists scorned infant baptism, believing the sacrament to be effective only when performed on those old enough to confess their faith in Christ of their own free will, a practice known as “believer’s baptism.” Thus, adults baptized as infants had to be “rebaptized.” The Anabaptists were pacifists, holding to a literal interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount that prohibits any form of violence, including military action. They embraced nonconformity, nonresistance, nonviolence, the sharing of possessions, and love feasts. Those in the movement’s inspirationist branches indulged in ecstatic dancing and speaking in tongues, aroused by the Holy Spirit. They were not averse to miracles or the idea of the resurrection of the dead.